PATNA DURBAR: A bed of thorns lies ahead for Nitish Kumar

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has taken over the reins of the state government for the fourth time, but this is the first occasion when he has done so ‘under duress’.

His comeback before the next assembly elections was definitely not part of the script that he had written while abdicating his chair nine months ago.

The JD(U) strongman, as everybody knows, had relinquished his post after owning moral responsibility for his party’s crushing defeat in the Lok Sabha elections last year. He had handed over the baton of good governance to an ‘unassuming’ mahadalit leader Jitan Ram Manjhi, hoping that he would carry forward his agenda until the state polls. But he had to reconsider his decision midway when Manjhi started following his own roadmap.

Senior JD(U) leader and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar being greeted by his party workers

Nitish has his task clearly cut out in his new innings, though. His biggest challenge is that he has to compete against himself now. During his previous, uninterrupted tenure of eight-and-a-half years, he had raised the bar of good governance in Bihar.

In a state known over the decades for political myopia and administrative sloth, he made development a buzzword with several out-of-the-box initiatives. The double-digit growth rate achieved during his tenure and steep jump in the per capita income earned him the moniker of ‘development man’.

Against this backdrop, the people will naturally expect him to accelerate the growth engine in his fresh term.

Nitish’s foremost focus now should be on bringing Bihar back on the rails of good governance. During Manjhi’s rein, the bureaucrats had turned complacent, taking him to be a stop-gap arrangement. This had adverse impact on the overall governance in general.

Besides, the chief minister has to complete his unfinished agenda, the most notable being the improvement in the power scenario. Three years ago, he had vowed that he would not go out to seek votes in the next assembly elections if he was not able to improve the electricity scenario. His next few months will definitely be spent on efforts to make the energy scenario look up in the state.

On the political front, with the emergence of the BJP as a stronger opposition in the state, he has to keep his flock united ahead of the next assembly elections.

Last but not the least, Nitish has to ensure that his alliance with Lalu Prasad does not take the sheen off his good governance agenda. The 15-year-long Rashtriya Janata Dal regime had earned notoriety for rampant lawlessness across the state. The new chief minister, therefore, has to ensure that his avowed agenda does not get diluted under the compulsions of coalition politics.

Nitish does not have much time left to do all that, though. He hardly has six-seven months to implement his decisions before the next polls. But if he is able to demonstrate by then that he has not lost his drive for good governance, he will certainly do himself a world of good in the all-important election year.

Manjhi turns to his original mentor

Jagannath Mishra was the pivot of Bihar politics before the likes of Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar took the centre-stage. Mishra held the chief minister’s post for three terms between 1975 and 1990 during the Congress era in the state. But after falling out with his party’s high command and his involvement in the prolonged animal husbandry scam cases, he gradually retreated into political hibernation in recent years.

Jitan Ram Manjhi seeking the blessings of his political guru, Jagannath Mishra

Acknowledged as a sharp political brain, Mishra was back in the spotlight when Jitan Ram Manjhi took over as the chief minister last year. Though many consider Nitish to be Manjhi’s political mentor, it was actually Mishra who had groomed Manjhi by making him a minister in the early 1980s.

As a loyal protégé, Manjhi has not forgotten Mishra’s favour. The first thing he did after becoming the chief minister and resigning from the post was that he paid a visit to Mishra to take his blessings and seek his guidance.

During his tenure, Manjhi also allotted a new bungalow to Mishra which he was entitled to as a former chief minister. He also restored the name of an engineering college in Darbhanga which was named after him in the earlier years.

In fact, Manjhi has had no qualms in accepting Mishra as his political guru. So much so that Manjhi is now consulting him on his plans to set up a new party in the state.

Urdu lost one of its greatest contemporary poets in the death of Dr Kalim Ajiz. He was 90 years old. Born in Nalanda district of Bihar, Ajiz was the most celebrated Urdu poet who used to take part in all the prominent national and international mushairas.

But he stopped doing so about two decades ago, saying the standard of Urdu poetry had gone down considerably.

That was not unusual from a poet who had the likes of Firaq Gorakhpuri among the admirers of his work.

A former professor of Urdu at Patna University, Ajiz has left a vast repertoire of work which underlined his resolve to carry forward the rich legacy of Shad Azimabadi, one of the greatest Urdu poets of all times, who also from Bihar.

The 'flying' minister

The Bihar BJP is known for bursting into celebrations at all its political opportunities, but it got an unusual reason to rejoice recently. Union minister for skill development Rajiv Pratap Rudy recently flew a Sukhoi-30, a frontline fighter aircraft of the Indian Air Force, during the recent Aero India 2015 in Bengaluru.

Though Rudy holds a pilot’s licence and is used to flying commercial flights, this was the first time when he had indulged in such daredevilry in the skies.

Former civil aviation minister Syed Shahnawaz Hussain felicitated the young minister at the party office at Bircchand Patel Road. Rudy had been flying the flights of a private airliner regularly before he became a minister in the Modi government.

According to an apocryphal story doing the rounds in the political circles of Bihar, Rashtriya Janata Dal president Lalu Prasad once spotted Rudy as the pilot of the plane he was travelling in from Delhi.

“Does he know how to fly a plane properly?” he reportedly asked an air hostess.

“Will we all land safely in Patna today?”

Not only that, he even asked an airline official to inform him well in advance if such a situation ever arose in future.

For the uninitiated, Rudy has been contesting the Lok Sabha elections against Lalu and Rabri from the Saran seat on the BJP ticket for many years.